PART II: Theodoric The Conqueror
With his destiny made clear to him, Theodoric was finally ready to focus on matters of the realm. First was the issue of succession. In spite of his youthful health, Theodoric recognized the importance of having an heir; life on the steppe was harsh, and could be cut short in an instant.
Theodoric felt more and more assured that the Gods were guiding him. All the more so when Ioulianos divined from the behavior of animals and the movement of the stars that Adriane carried a “true Olympian” in her womb.
He would be proven wrong in a few months’ time, though the signs had been correct. Adriane gave birth to twins: Hektor and Sophia. Theodoric was beside himself in joy, and declared a great feast to celebrate the birth of his first son and daughter.
Ioulianos, meanwhile, was concerned at the ambiguous nature of the twins as an omen. He chose not to trouble his King with his thoughts, though he feared that the birth suggested an uncertain future. The prophecy hinted at great triumph for the Gothikoi. Now he worried that the victory it forecast preceded a great disaster.
The next months were spent in peace as the Gothikoi continued to acclimate to their new grazing lands and multiply. A scheme was conceived to redistribute portions of the King’s tributes to families on the birth of a child, to incentivize a higher birth rate. Under Ioulianos’ supervision, great numbers of former barbaroi adopted the Hellenic faith and joined the people as Gothikoi. They brought horses with them, greatly expanding the livestock available to Theodoric to mount warriors.
By the start of 771, Theodoric felt the time had come. Somewhere in the distant East was his destiny; one obstacle between them was the Bakshir tribe, who claimed ownership of the steppe from the Ural river in the west to the surroundings of the southern Ural mountains in the east. The great span of territory had induced unrest in the Bashkirs, and their Khan was struggling against a powerful clan trying to overthrow him.
Before January was through, Theodoric had raised his host and marched into the Bakshir steppe, eager to exploit their weakness.
Theodoric’s host, nearing 2,000 men, met the Bashkir warriors near the Khan’s encampment at the foot of the Urals. Exhausted from years of infighting, the Bashkirs could only bring 1,500 men to bear. Their experience was greater than that of the Gothikoi, but this didn’t protect them from the withering arrow rain, which whittled down their numbers to such an extent that they were surrounded in the first charge.
In the midst of the battle, Theodoric was confronted by a great warrior of the Bashkirs. The two dismounted and dueled on foot. Teber lived to his reputation, fighting Theodoric to a stalemate with deft footwork, avoiding his attacks, and striking explosively when he saw an opening. Unfortunately for him, Theodoric’s stamina was greater than he hoped, and the two began to lose momentum at the same time. Sensing Teber’s strength leaving him, Theodoric baited another attack, and capitalized when the Bashkir had overextended himself.
Theodoric had killed a dozen men in combat now, but something about Teber’s death stuck in his mind. He was sluggish to mount his horse again and join his men in giving chase to the fleeing Bashkirs.
The Bashkir Khan had little choice but to take peace with the Gothikoi, who were quick to march on the encampment of Oshi, the Khan’s pretender, and burn it to the ground.
Theodoric didn’t return to Profiteia, as he had after the Khazar war. With his warriors raised and still prepared for battle, and himself in grips of a malaise he couldn’t shake, he turned his host south instead, to the dry plains between the Caspian and Aral seas.
The Oghuz were fewer than the Bashkirs, and tried to make their tent-city defensible against the Hellenes to give them an advantage. Their ferocity couldn’t make up for their numbers, however, and they were cut down by the dozens by the Gothikoi. Theodoric himself slew many of the Oghuz in a maddened trance which Timotheos called ‘the fury of Ares’. The women and children of the Oghuz suffered greatly from having the battle take place in the encampment that the tribe was effectively snuffed out in the span of a day, leaving few slaves to be taken by the Gothikoi.
Whatever bloodlust had taken Theodoric faded slowly on the long march back to Profiteia and his wife and children. Over a year had passed, and the tent-city was much smaller as clans moved to the new lands acquired from the Bakshirs and Oghuz; the quiet was a welcome respite for Theodoric, who spent many months afterwards with his family while the realm was surveyed and maps drawn up, and while the clans raised sons and daughters who could replace the fallen warriors in Theodoric’s host.
The King seemed to have finally settled into the quiet of ‘courtly’ life (such as it was on the steppe) until he finally saw the span of the Gothikoi realm according to the cartographers:
Ever since the flight of Caffa, no King of Gothika had ever dreamt that the people would reach such a height as this. Yet as the power of his warriors to sweep away the barbaroi was made clear, Theodoric was drawn ever more towards the prophecy. At his accession, he hoped his grandchildren might live to see the eastern Olympus; now he felt the Fates pushing him towards it, whispering to him to see it himself, at the head of the mightiest host in the world.
Invigorated to strike out again, Theodoric gathered his Council to help guide him forward. The obvious answer lay to the east; the Sultan of Bukhara controlled a span of dry plains and hills that reached all the way to the foot of the Hindu Kush range. In one war, Theodoric could do what the Gods had willed him; if only he could win it.
Bukhara alone was weak, its rulers content to collect tributes from the trade that passed through its cities. But it wasn’t alone. The mighty Abbasid Caliphate held Bukhara as a tributary, and would protect the Sultan from any war that threatened the free movement of trade on the silk road.
Someday, Bukhara, and, most likely, their allies in the Caliphate would need to be dealt with. But Gothika was too small to defeat them alone. As the only Greek-speaking people north of the Black Sea, and the only Hellenic realm in the world, no one was eager to sign treaties with the Gothikoi. The path forward would be a solitary one, but that left only one victor to collect the spoils.
If he would ever challenge the Caliph, Theodoric needed resources; gold would do, and there was much of it to be had in the Caucasus, where the great plundering empires had always faltered against rough terrain and fierce protectors. But Theodoric knew his own men were all the more ferocious, and further, he had a grudge against the Armenians; their merchants knew well the value of lumber to the Gothikoi, and took great pleasure in fleecing the people whenever they could. For their supposed civility, Theodoric thought them cruel and vindictive. It was past time they returned some of their ill-gotten wealth to the people.
Timotheos lead a raiding party into Circassia, while Theodoric himself took a second host into Derbent, whose young men had all been called up in the civil war between the Uqaylids. The towns made easy pickings for the Gothikoi raiders, who pillaged all along the Caspian coastline on the way to a prize greater than all the wealth they’d plundered so far…
As the Gothikoi tore through the countryside, they heard from captives and slaves that a great uprising had just begun in the Caliphate. The long-oppressed Shi’a had gathered in enormous numbers, occupied Baghdad, and declared their own Caliphate. Loyalist forces marched on them from every corner of the empire, but were each defeated in turn. Even altogether, they couldn’t have matched the Shi’a numbers, and one-by-one they were obliterated, allowing the Shi’a uprising to spread.
The Caliph fled as far from Baghdad as he could, relocating his court to Shirvan. What treasures he hadn’t saved from the Shi’a in Baghdad would be at Baku, so Theodoric set his sights there. He needed the Caliph’s wealth, but he also wanted to see what kind of strength they could put behind a reprisal.
It was early 773, a few months into the raiding expedition, that Theodoric’s forces arrived at Baku. They found the garrison small and stretched thin to protect the fortress, but their warriors fought with the ferocity of cornered animals. As few as they were, the Abbasid soldiers still bravely left the walls to raid the Gothikoi camps at night. They were great warriors, armed well and highly experienced from maintaining order over a vast empire. But, as with the Shi’a, their superiority at arms was outweighed by their inferiority in numbers; in October, the defenders sallied one last time, failed to break the encirclement, then surrendered.
The Caliph, as it happened, had escaped days earlier, narrowly avoiding capture and the hefty ransom he could have commanded for the Gothikoi. Enraged, Theodoric allowed his men to rampage through the streets, but there was little wealth to be stolen. If the Caliph had escaped Baghdad with a treasury, he had escaped Baku with it as well. Theodoric turned his gaze westwards. What he couldn’t get from the Caliph without risking an overwhelming reprisal, he would take from the Armenians instead.
In a brief visit back to Profiteia, Theodoric chanced upon some of the youths who had been too young to join the host before it had left for the raiding frontiers. In their spare time, they engaged in feats of strength and athleticism, hoping to hone their martial skills for when their turn at war came. It was an admirable pursuit, and Theodoric saw it would be to his benefit to spread it through the realm and beyond; young men could be kept from shiftlessness during times of peace, and barbaroi would learn to revere the Hellenic pantheon while matching their strength against the greatest warriors on the steppe.
As soon as a war plan had been drawn and coordinated with the Council of Companions, and a regent appointed to direct the resources flowing into Profiteia, Theodoric gathered his son and heir, Prince Hektor, and every warrior of age from the clans, and returned to the gathered host in Circassia. He didn’t wait for the eminent birth of his next child, whom Adriane named Alexandros in his absence.
Rhomaion had grown weak and decadent since the departure of the Hellenic Goths from Crimea in the 7th century; most of Hellas and Epirus had been had been subjugated by adventuring Serbians, and the Anatolian countryside was rife with religious tensions between Orthodox Christians and Iconoclasts, who counted the Emperor himself among their ranks.
Though they nominally protected Armenia, the Rhomaioi could spare precious few resources to defend their tributary in the east while Serbia and Bulgaria loomed in the west. Bulgaria, though wracked by ethnic unrest between Slavs and Bolghars, raised an army every few years and challenge the Romans for Adrianople or the crownlands around Constantinople, while the Serbians sat eager to pounce on any perceived weakness and take Rome for themselves, as they had taken Pannonia a few years before.
In March of 778, the Gothikoi horde advanced into Armenian Abkhazia, laying siege to every castle in the western half of the duchy.
The tiny army of Abkhazia folded before Theodoric’s horsemen, returning to their homes and praying for the Romans to save them. But the Romans never came.
Despite promising to aid the Armenians, the Romaioi didn’t spare a single soldier to the defense of Abkhazia. After two years and the occupation of nearly every town and castle in the country, the Armenians surrendered.
In his youth, Theodoric might have stopped there and returned his focus to the east. But, from the Abkhazian hills looking out across the coast of Trebizond, he felt a new ambition rising up in him, one more personal to him than fulfilling the Prophecy of Doros.
For centuries, the Crimean Goths had lived under the yoke of the Romaioi, sending tribute in exchange for the promise of protection; the Gothikoi had learned much earlier than the Armenians that that promise was empty. Whether Scythian, Magyar, or Khazaroi, the Romans sat by and counted their wealth while Goths were slaughtered wholesale, their towns razed, their lands burned by barbaroi to make more room for grazing horses and cattle. It was inevitable that the Romaioi would grow weak and decadent when they abandoned their own Gods for the dead god of the Christians, but to sit idly while their homeland languished under foreign barbarians shocked Theodoric. If there were any true Romaioi left in Rhomaion, Theodoric intended to shake them from their stupor.
The Romans were quick to raise their levies at the stat of the invasion, much to the chagrin of the helpless Armenians. The Gothikoi horde had swelled to over 6,000 horsemen in three hosts; when threatened, the fast-moving cavalry could quickly combine forces, but otherwise could spread out and take territory at a rapid pace. Arrayed against them were over 10,000 Romaioi, mostly made up of peasant levies, but with a sizable proportion of men-at-arms and trained cavalry thanks to the Varangian guard. These forces were well-composed for a battle, but not for maneuvering in the rough terrain of northern Anatolia, a fact that would come to haunt them.
The first battles of the war were the most precarious; at Amisos, Theodoric’s host was caught flat-footed by a rapid attack from the Duke of Charsianon, but was saved from defeat by the ferocity of Theodoric’s genera Bosporios, who forced back a charge from the Romans and turned it into a chaotic route.
At Rizaion, the Gothikoi baited a larger Roman army into attacking them in the foothills, where a second force sat ready to flank them with greater numbers. Though a group of skirmishers were surrounded and cut down by the Romans in the maneuver, the end result was catastrophic for the Romans, who lost ten men for each Gothikos they slew.
The lopsided losses at Rizaion shocked the Romans, who were never able to fully recover. Theodoric pressed his advantage, doggedly pursuing the scattered Roman forces and forcing them to continue retreating westward without fighting any decisive battles, except for a failed invasion of Armenia via the Black Sea. Poorly led and under-manned, the small marine force quickly alerted the Gothikoi to their presence and were annihilated by the first rearguard that came to meet them.
The rolling battles across the hills of northern Anatolia gave the aggressive Gothikoi many opportunities to capture fleeing Roman soldiers. The lucky ones would be ransomed back, but most would be sent marching east, ostensibly to keep them as prisoners, but realistically to keep the from being able to take up arms again before the war ended. The unlucky ones suffered far worse fates at the hands of their unaccountable captors.
The barbarity of ritual murder would have steeled the Romaioi against their invaders if they had any will left to fight. By the time the Gothikoi reached the Bosporos, there were no Roman soldiers left to try and thwart the crossing, and the local ferrymen and captains had little love for the Basileus but much love for the gold offered by Theodoric to see his army across the strait. Once they were on the other side, Theodoric’s army surrounded Constantinople and settled in for what would surely be a long siege.
What the Rhomaioi lacked in fighting spirit they made up for in fortification. The walls of Constantinople held against for three years against the makeshift siege weapons of the Gothikoi, until the defenders, starving, exhausted, and wracked by plague, opened the gates in surrender. Theodoric’s host swarmed over the city like locusts, stealing everything they could carry and destroying much of what they couldn’t.
Theodoric himself went straight to the palace, accompanied by his Companions Council and Guard. The storied Varangian Guard met him at the top of the palace steps and made way for him, recognizing that he would shortly be their new emperor.
Basileus Demetrios of house Bardouchos awaited him from the throne, a sneer on his face.
“That’s mine,” Theodoric said, gesturing in his general direction. The throne, the crown, the scepter, all were his.
“This will never be yours,” said Demetrios, rising from his throne. “All this belongs to Rhomaion. To Christ. You can take it from me, but it will never belong to a pagan defiler masquerading as a barbarian. When your sword arm fails you, someone will destroy your people as you’ve destroyed the people who came before you. That’s the way you’ve chosen. And as your people are being slaughtered and enslaved, Rhomaion will remain.”
“So be it,” said Theodoric, mounting the steps. “I enact the will of my Gods, as you yours.”
Saying that, he reached the throne where Demetrios sat. Theodoric thought he saw fear in the Basileus’ eyes, hidden but unmistakable. He reached out to the crown on his head, grabbed the crucifix mounted on top of it and snapped it off with a flick of his wrist. The crown tilted from the movement and fell over Demetrios’ eyes, forcing him to adjust it back. He did so just in time to see the King of the Goths tossing the cross down the stairs, where it sat heavily on the stone. Demetrios came tumbling after it, thrown down the stairs unceremoniously by Theodoric as a means of literal dethronement.
Demetrios was ejected from the palace soon after, and the looting horde entered in his place. Theodoric remained in the capital only long enough to have his share of the riches sent back to Profiteia with a trusted Kappadoki retainer and to vet a group of turncoat Varangians who preferred joining the Companion Cavalry to being disbanded with the rest of the Guard. Satisfied with their professed loyalty, Theodoric gathered his host and continued west, leaving his trusted eunuch behind as magistrate of the Roman territories.
The historical enormity of the fall of the eastern Roman Empire was insignificant to Theodoric, but its repercussions would echo through history. Though many of the people of the former eastern Roman Empire would still consider themselves Roman for some time yet, it would be generally agreed upon by later historians that 782 CE was the year the Roman Empire ended. For the Gothikoi, the only meaning of it was that a path had been opened to the holy land.
Theodoric and his men arrived in Thessalia awe-stricken at the lands they had only heard of in myths and legends now made real before them, and they did battle with incredible ferocity against the Serbians. For all their victories, however, progressing into Hellas and Epirus was slow. The northerners had come with large armies, and had gained enough familiarity with the terrain to make campaigning difficult for the Gothikoi. The Goths were also limited by Theodoric in their raiding of the local communities to bare essentials; these were their “brother people”, after all, and lived in the sight of Mount Olympus itself. Any unnecessary cruelty they inflicted here was all the more likely to be visited back upon themselves later.
In 786, Theodoric declared the conquest complete. There were still some provinces of northern Macedonia in the hands of the Serbians, but his host had grown weary of campaigning so far from their families, or were eager to lay down their arms awhile and settle on the former Serbian holdings in Greece. Many of the boys Theodoric had brought with him from Profiteia were now in their mid-20’s. Those who hadn’t taken wives during the campaign were desperate to find ones back home, amongst their own people. Theodoric thought back to the example of Megas Alexandros, who had fought all the way to the Indus only to be turned back by his own men. As much as it pained him to return home as his army reached its zenith in experience and cohesion, there was too little to gain fighting for scraps in the homeland. When he next called up his host, he knew they would be ready to defeat the Abbasids, and the heart of their new empire would then lay open to them. For such a prize he could wait for as long as he needed.
Theodoric’s eunuch magistrate, Ioustinianos, administered as deftly as he could, but the former Rhomaion was a sprawling empire. Nominally, the Gothikoi now controlled Sicily, the southern tip of Italia, Sardinia, and the Baleares. In fact, they had little contact with these holdings, and received nothing from them except the prestige accompanying their vassalage. The Anatolian lords were incensed by their relative lack of autonomy, especially those in the south who hadn’t seen the rage of the Gothikoi first hand. Without the support of the north or the isles, rebellion was impossible, so they settled for insolence, ‘forgetting’ to send taxes to the King, openly gathering into discussions about which Imperial claimant should be enthroned, and fomenting radical Christian sentiment among the peasantry as a wedge against the Hellenic Gothikoi.
The latter method yielded fruit in 796, as the host was returning to the Volga plain. More than 10,000 peasants took up arms in Thrace and marched on Constantinople, demanding a restoration of Christian rulership. Theodoric put them down mercilessly with his seasoned horde on the way back to Gothika.
Following the Thracian uprising and the bloodbath it preceded, the last tensions between the Gothikoi and their Rhomaioi subjects gave way to fear and an uneasy peace.
Theodoric arrived in Profiteia to a hero’s welcome and much rejoicing, but something had changed in him. His eyes had lost their shine and he seemed lost when he wasn’t training, fighting, or at the bottom of a wine vessel. He kept just enough wits enough to divert the resources flowing into Profiteia into ambitious projects, gathering new livestock herds and expanding the clan’s cottage industries.
The peace weighed heavily on Theodoric, and he, in turn, weighed heavily on Queen Adriane. Their eldest children, twins Hektor and Sophia, had reached age of majority and were considered to be fully adults. Theodoric had no interest in finding his daughter a suitable marriage partner; he had thought little about her before, and felt no need to make alliances.
Sophia was married to the Serbian King of Pannonia, who promised to keep the Kingdom of Serbia in check against adventurers. Now that he could fight, Hektorios longed to return to the battlefield, and urged his father to gather a host and march west to destroy the Kingdom of Serbia once for all. Two years had passed. The riders from the old host would only find themselves more and more entangled at home the longer they stayed, now that they had been given enough time to sire children for their clans. It was time to ride again!
Theodoric agreed to gather the host, sending the call out to all able-bodied men of the Gothikoi to bring their spears and horses to Profiteia. They numbered over 8,000 now, and though other armies might outnumber them, none could stand against the withering fire of their archers and the vicious charge of the Companion Cavalry. Whoever they next fell upon couldn’t hope to survive.
